Traditional style tattoo on a calf showing two crossed-finger hands and red roses within a gold-edged oval, with the words 'All the best lies they are told with fingers crossed' beneath.

Crossed fingers and roses on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two hands with fingers crossed, framed by a gold-edged oval on a teal background, with a red rose and green leaves in front and a smaller rose at the top. Bold outlines and solid colour fills with soft shading give it a classic flash look. Below the oval, a black lettered quote reads 'All the best lies they are told with fingers crossed', and the tattoo sits on a bare calf against a tiled floor.

Traditional Calf Hand Rose Leaves Oval frame Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windfalls had lain in the long grass since the first week of August, and by the third week Old Hannah Greave had stopped asking who was taking them. She asked her granddaughter instead. Edie stood by the press house with a split basket on her hip and her free hand behind her back, and said she had not been near the damson wall. Hannah believed her, because Edie had never once been caught in a lie. Everyone in Lower Wick said that was the trouble with her.

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Hannah had told her the old rule when she was small. A lie told with fingers crossed does not count against you, but the wall keeps the count. Every untruth goes into the brick, and where enough have gathered, a rose pushes through the mortar to show where they were kept. The press house had three roses on it already, one for each promise the miller's wife broke before she left for the coast. Hannah had never shown the girl the first one. Edie had found it herself, and had never asked.

The pedlar came up the lane that Thursday with a tray of ribbons and a voice like warm cider. He called her Nell by mistake, then laughed, then said he would marry her at the back end of harvest if she waited. He crossed his fingers as he said it, low by his coat, and Edie saw the crook of them the way you see a hook in a sleeve. She said nothing. She took the ribbon he gave her and tied it to the basket handle.

By morning there was a rose at the top of the wall, small and dark as a plum, and by Sunday the leaves had come after it. The pedlar had gone over the ridge before dawn with his tray empty. Edie went to the wall with her hands open at her sides. She pressed her palm to the bricks and told the truth out loud, which nobody in Lower Wick had ever heard her do, and the second rose came up beneath her fingers.